At Leeds, on Monday, Lord Spencer again insisted on the
necessity of passing the Land-purchase Bill, not only because we are hencurably bound to the Irish landlords,—whose rents we fixed by the Act of 1881,—to do so, but still more because unless the agrarian question s first fairly settled, theJt1 Tiegislature will never have fair play. "it is right to do so, not only for the Irish landlords, but for the Irish tenants, and also for the Irish Assembly. We must remove this difficulty, which has baffled us so long, before we hand over the government to an Assembly which has already numerous and. manifold difficulties." At the saw meeting, Mr. Herbert-Gladstone is reported to have boasted that " from the time of King John" to the present day, whenever any real political reforms had been proposed, " the wealth, educa- tion, and intelligence of the country had been joined together in opposition to the rights of the people." We suppose that he meant to =We the time of King John from his purview, for he would hardly maintain that the Barons who extorted King John's signature to Magna Charta had neither wealth, nor education, nor intelligence. But if wealth, education, and intelli- gence now always mislead in politics, is it not to be inferred that they are altogether mischiefs, and may we not look to Mr. Herbert Gladstone for a series of measures intended to render the accumulation of either wealth, knowledge, or culture im- possible for the future P It would be easy enough to multiply very seriously the many natural difficulties in the way of these accumulations.
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